As is known in the art, the commercially interesting range of frequencies for wireless applications is very large, extending over approximately three orders of magnitude from about 100 MHz to about 100 GHz. Nevertheless, this resource (i.e. the range of available frequencies and frequency bands) is becoming increasingly crowded. Next-generation radios will need to be smart enough to be able to find any available space in the RF spectrum, and flexible enough to be able to operate there.
Furthermore, some next-generation radios may need to serve as translator or gateway radios in a heterogeneous wireless network. Gateway radios receive signals in different formats and frequencies from input radios, translate them to other formats and then transmit them to other radios. Previous attempts to build such software, universal or cognitive radios have only operated over limited frequency ranges. They have also suffered from high power consumption because digitizing the entire input signal bandwidth immediately following the antenna is energy-inefficient.